for orchestra

Commissioned by SWR / Donaueschinger Musiktage

A few short bars from the Intermezzo of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Seventh Symphony provide the entire material for this composition. Through the “sampling” of this score fragment, its musical gesture is frozen: it becomes an “animated still life” (Lauren Berlant), an image that slowly drifts by. The material is extremely reduced, yet never exactly identical. The gesture appears in fragments, presented from countless different perspectives. Only the logic of digital processes is capable of achieving such a precision of cuts within the sample, whose artifacts are translated into complex, displaced rhythms and ornamental variety. This careful transcription of digital artifacts is an attempt to approach a perspective of machine listening. 

Each bar is a cut. The result is a continuity that is dialectically dependent on discontinuities. Peter Osborne, in Anywhere or Not at All, refers to Gaston Bachelard: “‘Psychic continuity is not given but made.’ And it is made out of the temporal structure of the relations between acts: ‘What has most duration is what is best at starting itself up all over again.’” In other words: The deepest continuity is paradoxically that which continually restarts or renews itself.

Sunday, 19 October 2025 — 17:00
Donaueschinger Musiktage — Closing Concert

SWR Symphony Orchestra
Elena Schwarz — conductor

The deepest continuity is paradoxically that which continually restarts or renews itself.

Laure M. Hiendl